Moodle plugins directory: Poster

Poster is a resource activity module allowing to create a web page. What makes this module unique is that the contents of the poster page is composed of Moodle blocks (such as HTML block, Calendar block, Latest news block etc.). It provides yet another place within the course where blocks can be put without polluting the course front page.

Motivation

There are many useful blocks available for Moodle. Typically, they can be only added to the sides of the Moodle pages, or to the
user's dashboard page (also known as My home page). Sometimes, you may want to keep your course main page quite clean, not cluttered
with blocks on both sides. In such case, you can put useful blocks into a separate Poster page.

The overall concept is somewhat similar to how pages are created in Mahara - but it is typically the teacher in Moodle who creates
the Poster for students to view.

Usage

To use the module, you should understand how Moodle sticky blocks work. See Block
settings page for more details.

Add the module instance into the course.

Keep the editing mode on.

Add the Moodle blocks you want to display on the poster.

Click the icon to configure the block. Set the block instance so that it is displayed in the context of the
poster, on page type Poster module main page (mod-poster-view), inside the region mod_poster-pre or mod_poster-post.

Alternatively, use the drag and drop feature to move the block to the regions at the poster content area.

Note that some blocks must be first added to the course main page first, configured to be displayed at any page and then
configured again to be displayed at the poster main page only (this is how block positioning works in Moodle generally).

Implementation

The Poster module uses not so well known feature of the Moodle blocks architecture. In almost all cases, it is the theme that
defines regions where plugins can be added to. However in special cases, such as this one, any Moodle plugin can define its custom
block regions. Within the context of the Poster module instance, when displaying its view.php page, two extra block regions are
defined - mod_poster-pre and mod_poster-post. The Poster module itself is just a tiny wrapper for displaying these two regions
as its content. Simple and clever.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2015 David Mudrák

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Thanks Tom. If you believe it is a problem with the Poster (and not the theme, as in you see the problem on the Poster page only and nowhere else), please report the details into a new issue in the plugin's bug tracker. Please attach screenshots so to better illustrate the problem. Thanks in advance.

How much work would be involved in displaying the poster content directly on the course page as opposed to a separate resource? I was thinking of using the OneTopic course format with your poster resource to mimic a Mahara collection.